Page 78 of Prince of Masks
The poor visibility has the rugby game closer to the stone terrace than usual. The field of wet grass (and now, torn up mud that will have the groundskeepers fuming) is squared in by thick hedges. There, barrelling into each other, I count four men.
Takes me another moment to make out their faces through, not just the wispy fog but, the mud streaking their faces.
Serena’s older brother, Dez, and Landon’s younger brother face off. A handful of years between them, but Grey Barlow isn’t lacking in the bulked muscles he spends his days crafting like a sculpture. He’s all about protein shakes and counting calories that one. Annoying company when dining out.
More witches have surrounded us; Mr Barlow pushed aside for Mr Vasile to shake Father’s hand and brush a kiss over Mother’s cheek.
If I don’t like Mr Barlow, I loathe Mr Vasile.
The feeling is mutual—he doesn’t even say hello to me, he rarely does.
Father hardly notices, he’s quick to enter a loud conversation about the finalisation of their contracts between Serena and Oliver.
I flick my gaze back to the grounds, grounds that just… go on and on and on, farther than I can see from the terrace that wraps around the rear of the manor.
Now that I consider it, then throw my gaze around the terrace, I realise something odd.
The Ströms aren’t here.
I see no sign of them.
Not Asta, her father, her mother, not even her older sister who, if it’s at all possible, is even more striking than Asta herself. Both of them inherited that sharp blond hair that borders on silver, the soft porcelain complexion that melts into snow, the genetics that are needed for slight frames with lovely curvesonlyat the hips.
When I gain a few, that weight doesn’t just stick to my hips, it has a mind of its own and goes wherever the inclination takes it.
I wish I inherited Mother’s genetics for weight, for body shape. Stark, tall, slender. Naturally, so.
I don’t know where I got my eat-chocolate-pay-the-price genes, but it sure wasn’t from her.
Probably Nonna. She’s a fuller woman who, in older photographs, the black and white kind, was something of a Marilyn Monroe type.
Movement brushes behind me, stealing me from my thoughts.
I can’t turn around, not while I’m cornered like this, and it feels like I’m a sardine in a tin, trapped with so many others.
So I touch my chin to my shoulder, neck craned and stiff, to see Mr Burns standing at the threshold of the double doors.
He brings a whistle to his thin lips, the sort of mouth that, for some odd reason, is never flushed with its full pink pigmentation, and so they are beige, always beige.
I cringe—
He blows the whistle.
The sharp sound is a sword through my bones.
But the whistling is curt, and it reaches all the way out onto the grounds, past the rugby game, and over to the rockpool that Mrs Barlow strolls.
She pauses her wandering, and angles her face up at us, at the manor, the terrace—then starts the hike back.
The whistle was the return call for tea and sandwiches, and it draws in glances from the field where the rugby game has hesitated.
I turn my cheek to the mud before familiar ice eyes find me and, instead, scan the crowd clustered on the terrace for Serena.
I don’t have the best angle for finding anyone, I’m still backed into the threshold, my parents shields in front of me, but shields already too deep in animated chatter with others, and Oliver has dipped off already, wandered a few paces away.
Call me a copycat, but that gives the green light, and in a heartbeat, I’m ducking under Mr Burns’s outstretched arm as he passes off a letter to Mr Sinclair, and I am shuffling around bodies to reach the barrier of the terrace.
I’m only an arm’s reach from the stairs when the metal clack of boots start to thump on stone.
